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[Foxeye]

There is a new breed of Tablet PCs emerging that is VERY friendly to digital artists. They are the love-child of the old Tablet PCs (heavy, clunky, grainy-screened, laptops with a 2-4k pricetag) and Tablets (light, cheap, low-powered toys  geared for consuming rather than producing content, with no pressure sensitivity or ability to run your favorite art apps). 

Currently there are two offerings of this New Breed that are artist-friendly, both in the $1-1.3k range (that's pricey for a tablet, but a REALLY good price for a PC with the powerful hardware that these pack). I wanted to give a quick overview of why they are artist-friendly, and the relative strengths of the two models.

Both of these...
- have dual touch and stylus Wacom digitizers capable of 256 levels of pressure sensitivity.
- have Core i5 processors, up to 4GB of memory, and an SSD. This means they can run all your art apps except for some 3D art apps that require a dedicated graphics card
- have attractive, grain-free screens with rich colors
- have a short "parallax" (the distance between the stylus point and the cursor)

ASUS EP121

I've been using this for a year and loved it so much we kept a spare around.  It was the first of the Windows 7 tablets to use a Wacom, and while it had it's shortcomings, they couldn't keep enough on the shelves.

Advantages:
- Larger screen of the two choices, at 12".
- Two USB ports and an SD card slot
- Prices may start to drop now that the Samsung Series 7 Slate is out
- someone has written a handy app that turns the home button into a touch "toggle", which is very useful when doing art apps

Disadvantages
- build quality a bit cheaper
- still a bit too heavy/large to carry everywhere like you would an iPad
- less powerful overall

Samsung Series 7 Slate

Just got this a few days ago and am IN LOVE.  I've been waiting for this computer my entire life. O_O

Advantages:
- Smaller screen means it's easier to carry around with you everywhere (it's the size of a Macbook Air 11")
- Superior screen of the two (400 nits, and more saturated colors)
- Volume buttons can be remapped to Undo/Redo using a handy little app called AutoHotKey (HUGE DEAL, trust me)
- More powerful of the two offerings
- Larger SSD of the two
- has a docking station that provides GB ethernet (have to use USB dongle with ASUS). Docking station makes it that much easier to just "grab-and-go", and I sorely missed having one on ASUS.
- feels more solid
- Samsungs has written a touch-friendly interface that makes the user-experience that much friendlier

Disadvantages
- Less screen real estate
- only one USB, and MicroSD instead of SD card
- will probably be more expensive once EP121 prices drop

[Czarine]

I have been dreaming of a device like this. Unfortunately, it's still way expensive for my budget...  :'( Does the pressure sensitivity ignore your hand while using a stylus (like, can you rest your hand against the screen while drawing)? Any lag with larger brushes?

[Foxeye]

The palm recognition is a little flakey, which is why I prefer to turn the touch-control off when I draw.  It occasionally throws a random brush stroke otherwise. (The custom app I mention for the ASUS EP121 does this really conveniently for you by remapping one of the physical buttons on the tablet...unfortunately no one has written a similar tool for the Samsung yet).

On the Samsung I have so far tested a 5500x4200 pixel PSD file in CS5.5 with 25 layers and a 900px brush without lag...bigger brush than that starts to get a little draggy.  The ASUS starts lagging a little bit sooner.

Here's another post from an artist at tabletpcreview.com that has used both:

Been doing some art on the S7S all weekend.......this is prehaps the best tablet PC for art use....EVER.

The Screen is gorgeous, It makes the Ep121 looks like TN paneled crap in comparison. And although its only a little smaller, the thinness makes it so much more comfortable to hold...and really just use in general.

As much as everyone was complaining about how it has no pen silo...I'm glad it doesn't because it wouldn't be as thin if they put one in there.

And so far I've only thrown Photoshop CS5 on it....and it runs beautifully. Where as the Ep121 needs to be put on high performance battery mode to run photoshop decently, the S7S takes it in strides on the default power setting.

Also...one beef I had with the ep121....it had a brush lag. It didn't really get in the way of creating art on it...but it was quite noticable. Like if you have a ep121 with Photoshop and Paint Tool Sai installed....Sai is far faster then photoshop when laying down a brush stroke, or at least for the computer to track and register it.

On the S7S.....the Brush tool in photoshop runs just as fast and well as Sai would. Maybe a tad slower....but leaps and bounds better then the ep121.

And on full screen brightness using Photoshop, I did get 4-5 hours of battery life...which is flipping phenomenal given how thin the device is. This tablet could easily last an entire life drawing class.

Overall I am very pleased with the S7S. So glad I chose this over investing in a Cintiq 24HD.